Trying to convince myself that, while a Democrat-majority House will be very, very bad, Trump will not abandon the American people and may still win 2020.

In no particular order, here are my thoughts on the morning after an election that saw Republicans gain strength in the Senate, while losing their majority in the House:

1. We kept the Senate, which matters when it comes to the judiciary (phew!) and Trump’s ability to get his people appointed.

2. Trump can continue to dismantled the regulatory state, which is huge.

3. Trump still has a free hand with foreign policy and I like his approach to foreign policy.

4. The Democrats will use their hold on the House to escalate their open border policy, but I think (hope) Trump as the executive still has the stronger hand on this. I also hope (think) that the American people will not appreciate an open border, especially minorities who are always on the front line when it comes to illegal immigrants taking jobs and introducing new crime into a region.

5. What’s going to come out of the House in the upcoming years will be, literally, insane. Sarah Hoyt is very worried that Trump, who is committed to deal-making, will cave or, to use a Bill Clintonesque term from 1994, “triangulate”:

Trump is by nature a deal maker. After the first two government shut downs, he’ll meet them halfway. This will wreck our economy and yep his presidency with it. As they did with Bush in 2006, they now have a chance to wreck the economy and have it blamed on the sitting president.

Hoyt’s legitimately worried about a lot of other things. If you want the pessimist’s view of the next two years, be sure to read what she has to say.

Even Don Surber, the man who has been my compass for optimism for the past three years, is not happy. He bats aside attempts at optimism from his readers and from Glenn Reynolds, who’s hoping for a Reagan-era “coming together.” With a Democrat-majority House — or rather, with this 21st Century style Democrat-majority House — that’s not going to happen says Surber:

He just doesn’t get it. These Democrats don’t care. Infrastructure?

These Democrats let people poop in the streets of Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco. These Democrats let the homeless line pup tents along the boulevards of Maxine Waters’s Los Angeles. These Democrats let gangbangers turn Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago into a shooting gallery.

All they care about is power. Lord Acton said power corrupts. Imagine now what happens when you give power to the already corrupted.

Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the four Congressional Democrats with the clearance to actually put eyes on all of the top secret documents made available to date by the FBI and others as part of the House Intelligence Committee investigation, made a jaw dropping admission in so many words while answering media questions. He admits he has seen no evidence to date to establish any sort of criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. In other words, more than a year into this politically-driven investigation, there is no Trump-Russia Collusion.

So, if there is no evidence to support any of the allegations, when are we going to start investigating to determine whether this was a criminal enterprise involving Christopher Steele, CIA Director John Brennan, Fusion GPS, the DNC and others to throw the election to Clinton, destroy Trump’s presidency, and protect corrupt government officials?

Lee Smith, writing at The Federalist, looks in detail at how senior figures in the media, namely New Yorker editor David Remnick, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, former New Republic editor Franklin Foer, and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, coordinated with Fusion GPS and the DNC to create an echo chamber, driving the Trump Russia collusion narrative. It is a sordid story that needs to come out as well.

On a related note is a Ted Talk given by Sheryl Attkinson, where she not only puts in perspective “fake news,” but identifies the source of the fake news controversy, much of which involves the Trump-Russia narrative, with a starring role from a Google owner. The progressive left has used the mantra of “fake news” to justify their creep into censoring conservative voices. I’ve long believed that social media sites and the major search engines are so powerful that they need either to be subject to anti-trust litigation and / or they need to be required to adhere to the First Amendment as if they were a public institution. [Read more…]

The real Russia collusion — Obama and Clinton team with Russia against Trump — makes sense if you look at the motives driving the various actors.

Da Vinci once said that “Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.” Motive is certainly a helpful tool when it comes to bringing an organizing principle to the sprawling, chaotic Russia collusion — the real Russia collusion. The real one isn’t the fake claim that Trump, who had no contacts in Russia, partnered with Putin, who had no reason to root for Trump, during the 2016 election cycle. Instead, I’m talking about the real Russia collusion, one that sees more evidence every day to support it. This is the one that says that Obama and Hillary, along with all their high level minions, conspired with Russia to keep Trump out of the White House.

You might not believe it from my blog silence about the unfolding Russian collusion, but I am paying attention. I daily read multiple articles analyzing the Nunes Memo, and the Grassley-Graham letter. I try to keep track of the cast of players: (1) the various swamp crawlers, from Hillary to Blumenthal to Brennan to Simpson to Shearer; (2) the surprise guest appearances from Obama administration players such as Rice, Lynch, and (3) the rotating cast of regular players at the FBI and the DOJ, from Comey to Strzok to Mueller. Looking at it this way, it’s pretty clear that one of the things that’s truly Russian about this whole scandal is that it has the complexity and character count you’d find in War and Peace or some other epic Russian novel.

After reading and reading and reading, I have to admit that I’m still confused about the specifics (timing, facts, lies, laws lying in smoking ruins, etc.). Nevertheless, the overarching picture emerges clearly from this welter of data: Trump did not collude with the Russians to win the election or betray America, although there were people who were temporarily on the very periphery of Trump’s campaign who would have liked to have seen Trump be even more friendly to Russia than Obama and Hillary already were. Instead, it was the Hillary team, with help from the Obama administration, that either colluded with Russia or were Russia’s patsies in trying to set up Trump.

Understanding which is the real Russian conspiracy has the unexpected byproduct of bringing people’s obvious or known motives into alignment with the emerging facts. The original story, the one that had Trump as the conspirator, never made sense, because neither he nor Putin had a motive to do what they were alleged to have done. Thus, it never made sense that Putin would collude against a Hillary presidency. Indeed, the last thing Russia wanted was for Trump to win. After all, despite his stated willingness to work with Putin, Trump was shaping up to be a nightmare for Putin for one very specific reason: Drill, baby, drill.

Under Putin’s corrupt oligarchy, the Russian economy is a wasteland. Its main reliable source of wealth is oil. The Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to destroy America’s oil-producing abilities were a boon to the Russians. Trump’s stated desire to bring America’s oil back on-line was something Putin would have wanted to avoid at all costs. It was also unclear whether Trump would continue to follow Obama’s lead when it came to Ukraine, Central Europe generally, Syria, and Iran — in all of which locales Obama had withdrawn from traditional American friends or funded foes and, when possible, handed power to Russia.

That’s why, when Steele and others (Brennan? Shearer?) came sniffing around seeking dirt on Trump, Putin and his spymasters must have been beyond thrilled. They knew Hillary could be bought; they knew Hillary would continue Obama’s effort to handicap America’s energy industry; they assumed that Hillary would follow Obama’s disreputable patterns towards traditional American friends and foes; and they probably had enough blackmail material on Hillary to last for six terms, not just one or two. (Not the least of which, as Trump pointedly joked during the campaign, would have been those 30,000 emails Hillary erased from her unprotected server, but which the Russians had probably hacked years before. Even without that, the Russians almost certainly had information about Bill’s myriad indiscretions, Benghazi, and the whole Clinton Foundation.)

Motive is even easier to find with Obama and Hillary. Obama had a legacy to preserve. Obama, who has never been a fool although he is a knave, understood that his legacy was built on sand. Except for Obamacare, he had no major legislation. All he had were executive orders, regulations, “Dear colleague” letters, and a host of other ephemeral directives that would become embedded in America culture only if a subsequent administration made it clear to true believers in government and education that these legal simulacra needed to stay to complete America’s fundamental transformation.

As for Hillary — well, heck, Hillary understands that, if you want to win, you have to cheat. She didn’t cheat hard enough in 2008, but in 2016, by God! She was going to cheat and she was going to cheat big, thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s willingness to support her win at all costs philosophy.

So, if you want motive for collusion, you have it with the Obama administration, the Hillary campaign, and the Putin administration. All of them had a vested interested in ensuring that Trump lost.

But one still has to ask why would career civil servants be so willing to join in? Sure, Trump talked about trimming back the civil service, but everyone talked about it and nobody did anything about it. I think there must have been more than mere job security at issue for same many upper ranking members of the FBI and the DOJ willingly to jettison laws, procedures, and their own past histories of relatively upright behavior.

Before I go on, let me say that I’m not talking about people such as Brennan, whom I believe to be completely corrupt, or truly evil hangers-on such as Blumenthal and Shearer. I’m talking about the others, including people like Comey and Mueller. They were always political and played hard ball to advance their careers, and they were unethical in a “cut-throat office politics” sort of way, but no matter how one points out their viciousness and failures of intelligence, before now, they’d never crossed the line. Had they walked right up to it and put their toes on it? You bet. But cross it ? No.

Lacking evidence that Trump or his team were guilty of actual Russia collusion, they resort to smears. Scott Adams shows how this technique works.

Although the election is over and Scott Adams is no longer making predictions, I still check his blog on a regular basis. He thinks entirely outside of the box, but not in a crazy, unrealistic way. Instead, his clever ideas open up new ways of thinking about things.

This video-podcast he did shows him taking on the Russia collusion meme that dominates progressive thought. His targets CNN’s Don Lemon, which is a lovely thing, because Lemon is at the head of the pack when it comes to the Russia collusion smear: